For parsing HTML, I prefer TreeBuilder. Just dumping text is easy:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $filename = "sample.html";
dumpText(HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_file($filename));

sub dumpText {
  my $element = shift;
  my ( @contents ) = $element->content_list();
  for my $content ( @contents ) {
    if ( ref($content) ) {
      dumpText($content);
    } else {
      print $content,"\n";
    }
  }
}
[download]

Regards

Jeff